Posted on February 1st, 2008 by Ron Bertino
I’ve managed to find a freeware product that allows you to take an image backup of any partition (including the system partition) while the server is still live.
It’s capable of using a “volume lock” or “volume shadow copy services”. The latter will only interrupt server access for a matter of around 5 seconds or so.
I spent some time testing this, and the 2 tools work perfectly.
To create the live images, you’ll need a tool called DriveImage XML.
You can use DriveImage XML in order to create live images of any partition, and you can also restore any partition other than the system partition, right from within Windows as usual.
If you want to restore the system partition, then you need to boot from a CD and then run the restore operation.
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Filed under: Windows Vista, Microsoft, tools, Windows Server 2003 |
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Posted on March 24th, 2007 by Ron Bertino
Hamad Darwish is a photographer who has an extensive portfolio on Flickr.
He did quite a few shots for use in Windows Vista, of which Microsoft chose two.
He has recently made the entire Windows Vista shoot pics available as a free download. These images are all in high resolution (1920×1200).
You’ll find these images at the bottom of his homepage.
Feel free to download them and throw them on your system, regardless of whether or not you run Vista.
I personally cycle through a few of these backgrounds every few weeks.
They’re stunning shots.
Update from 23-Apr-2007: Here’s another great set of wallpapers.
Update from Jan-1-2008: And more here.
Filed under: tools |
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Posted on March 23rd, 2007 by Ron Bertino
Windows Vista has a new feature called User Account Control (UAC). The premise is that if you are running as a local administrator of the machine (which is very common) you could have your system compromized by software running under your user context.
Since you’re running as an administrator, then malicious software can completely take control of your systems. Not a good thing.
Unix admins have known for many years that you would have to be crazy to run your day to day user tasks as a local admin (called “root” in Unix-speak). Unix admins always make sure that they run their day to day tasks on a separate user account with diminished priviledges. If they need to do something where they need admin rights, then they simply temporarily elevate their security level, do the admin task, and then revert to their normal lower priviledge account.
This is a standard practice for all Unix admins everywhere.
Windows admins and users almost never do the above though, partly because doing so was not only impractical but also almost technically impossible….at least with Windows versions up to Windows XP.
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Filed under: Fun, Microsoft, apple |
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Posted on March 21st, 2007 by Ron Bertino
A report was recently released suggesting that user productivity has taken a step back in Windows Vista, when compared to the level of user productivity in Windows XP.
The researcher may be correct in terms of certain functions in Windows Vista being slower than in Windows XP, but the main issue being ignored are the many additional features in Windows Vista which result in increased productivity.
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Filed under: Windows Vista, Microsoft |
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